Database Management

Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) continue to do the heavy lifting in data management, while newer database management systems are taking on prominent roles as well. NoSQL database systems such as Key-Value, Column Family, Graph, and Document databases, are gaining acceptance due to their ability to handle unstructured and semi-structured data. MultiValue, sometimes called the fifth NoSQL database, is also a well-established database management technology which continues to evolve to address new enterprise requirements.

Database Management Articles

The Rocket U2 Denver team is moving its offices. According to the company, customers should see minimal-to-no disruption in service during the relocation, as the U2BC system and U2 websites are hosted at another Rocket site. Starting Monday, August 30, the new address will be 4600 S. Ulster Street, Suite 1100, Denver, Colo., 80237. All phone numbers and email addresses remain the same.

Entrinsik has announced that, at the recommendation of its solution provider, Progenixx, the Everett Housing Authority (EHA) has selected Entrinsik's Informer Web Reporting software. For over 60 years, EHA has served the housing needs of the people of Everett, Wash. Critical to supporting this commitment is the ability to provide its staff across four departments with information that is up-to-the-minute and easily accessible in order to optimize decision making without burdening IT with numerous custom report requests.

The latest version of Sybase Unwired Platform, 1.5.2, that will enable enterprise developers to simply and quickly build applications that connect business data from more sources, including SAP applications, to mobile workers on any device, is now available.

Sybase, Inc., an SAP company, recently announced the continued growth of the Sybase(R) IQ partner ecosystem. Through key relationships with companies such as Bradmark Technologies, Fuzzy Logix, ISYS Search Software, Kapow Technologies, SAS, Tableau Software, and Zend Technologies, Sybase IQ analytics server continues to support the demanding analytics environments of its more than 1,800 customers and 3,200 installs worldwide.

Sybase ASE 15 is a significant upgrade for Sybase customers who are expecting to spend more time testing their applications to ensure getting their environment up and running as quickly as possible. To reduce the complexities of the upgrade process, Bradmark's Surveillance enables Sybase professionals to benchmark their current environment to see the cause of any outage or slow performance issues before or after the migration process.

At an event last week co-located in Boston and Frankfurt, company leaders from SAP AG and Sybase came together for the first time to share the strategy and joint product direction for the newly combined companies. SAP confirmed that Sybase will be run as a separate, independent unit - and that customer investments in Sybase products will be preserved and supported.

Idera, a provider of Microsoft SQL Server management and administration solutions, has announced Idera SQL admin toolset 1.5, a set of 25 desktop tools for monitoring, troubleshooting, administering and reporting on SQL Server.

Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu, has launched a virtual appliance of IBM's DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in private and public cloud configurations. Canonical also announced that IBM has completed validation of the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support Server Edition.

Earlier this year, Andy Flower took over as president of the Independent Oracle Users Group from Ian Abramson. With Oracle OpenWorld right around the corner, Flower recently talked with Database Trends and Applications how the IOUG is changing to best meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the expanding Oracle ecosystem, despite what continues to be a difficult economy. For the IOUG, it is "the year of the member" and it all starts with the database, he says. Here, an excerpt of that interview.

Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One has delivered a world record price/performance result with the TPC-C benchmark, Oracle announced. Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One running on an HP ProLiant ML350 G6 server with a single six-core Intel Xeon X5650 2.67 GHz processor with Oracle Enterprise Linux set a world record TPC-C price/performance result of $0.39/tpmC with a performance result of 290,040 tpmC.

As part of its Power announcements yesterday, IBM introduced IBM Rational Power Appliance, a family of software appliances comprised of Power Express servers that are pre-loaded and pre-configured with IBM Rational software for AIX development. Available in a range of sizes and programming languages to suit specific user requirements, these ready-to-use systems provide customers a fully-enabled software development environment that can be put to use in a matter of hours.

Continuity Software, a provider of disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) management solutions, has announced the general availability of RecoverGuard version 5.2 (v5.2), featuring a Private Cloud Advisor designed to enable customers to ensure availability, recoverability and adherence to industry best practices in the private cloud. "Until about a year ago, no one really used private clouds in the mid and large enterprise for mission-critical systems, but in the last 12 months, we have started to see a shift toward people either deploying such systems or at least planning the deployment of private clouds in the medium and large data centers," Gil Hecht, founder and CEO of Continuity Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

EnterpriseDB has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its flagship Postgres Plus Advanced Server database. EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.4, which is built on the open source object relational Postgres database, is now fully compatible with all the features and functionality found in the most recent community distribution. The new release provides increased core functionality for the database as a whole, increased Oracle compatibility, increased manageability, and increased security, according to Robin Schumacher, EnterpriseDB's director of product strategy.

CA Technologies announced new identity and access management (IAM) solutions intended to enhance security, ease compliance efforts, and automate IT processes within cloud computing environments. The company released a new version of CA Identity Manager, which extends identity management to cloud applications, as well as leverage CA SiteMinder portfolio to control access to its SaaS applications.

First elected to Oracle Applications Users Group board of directors in 2009, David Ferguson became president of the OAUG this year. He talks with DBTA this month about how the users group is getting "back to basics" with educational sessions and networking opportunities as well as the new approaches it is taking to meet its members' evolving needs.

Earlier this year, Andy Flower took over as president of the Independent Oracle Users Group from Ian Abramson. With Oracle OpenWorld right around the corner, Flower talks with DBTA about how the IOUG is changing to best meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the expanding Oracle ecosystem, despite what continues to be a difficult economy. For the IOUG, it is "the year of the member" and it all starts with the database, he says.

Revelation Software has announced the availability of a significant new release of OpenInsight (OI) Development Suite, which continues Revelation's commitment to extend OpenInsight by embracing new technologies as well as providing seamless integration with external databases. OI 9.2, which the company has been working on for more than 2 years, includes the new OpenInsight for Web (O4W) and SQL Connector.

When a new version of one of my favorite products ships, one of the first things I do is open the online help and read "What's New in This Release." I usually look at the new features from two levels. First, I don't install much software that I don't use, so I'm always keen to see what the new features can do to make my life better, my time more productive, my computer faster, my kids behave better, and so forth.

Design should be an intention, preferably a planned intention. In that intention, design requires more groundwork than a simple thought-train such as the following, "I planned to write a module that functions; since the module functions, my designs are working." Some situations do exist where true design really is less important than successful functionality. Determining the appropriate level of design and preparation offers an interesting question to every architect. At the lowest level, standards and practices present suitable patterns that can serve as a design skeleton for those low-level or isolated items not requiring a heavy-handed blueprint.

What is the most difficult thing about acquiring enterprise software? If you are like most IT technicians, your first inclination was probably something related to cost justification. Let's face it, enterprise software typically is very expensive ... and eventually, something will need to bring costs more in line with value.

Extending its leadership in the enterprise tape market, Oracle announced high availability and capacity enhancements to its StorageTek tape libraries and drives. New features of the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System include an increase in scalable capacity from 70,000 to 100,000 tape slots and redundant electronics to help customers manage growth, increase availability and reduce risk. "Being able to scale to 150 petabytes with up to 100,000 tape slots under the management of a single library is a significant advantage for customers who are dealing with explosive data growth, as many companies are today," Tom Wultich, director of product management for tape at Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Revelation Software has announced the availability of a new release of OpenInsight (OI) Development Suite. The 9.2 release includes the SQL Connector, which allows SQL tables in relational database management systems including Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL, to be seen as native tables to all components of OpenInsight, including forms, reports, popups, stored procedures and O4W. "What we have done is built intelligence into the connector so that programmers that have been doing work, not just in OpenInsight, but any flavor of MultiValue, can now use that same knowledge base that they have, and go against data that used to be fairly difficult for them to get at," Mike Ruane, president and CEO of Revelation Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Revelation Software has announced the availability of a new release of OpenInsight (OI) Development Suite, which continues Revelation's commitment to extend OpenInsight by embracing new technologies as well as providing seamless integration with external databases.

The International Sybase User Group (ISUG) has announced the immediate availability of its latest course offering in conjunction with online training specialist eLearnIT LLC. The new course is entitled "ASE Performance & Tuning with MDA Tables" and has been planned to offer a pragmatic combination of both practical and theory-based skills for Sybase DBAs. With today's data center management demands becoming increasing time critical as well as mission critical, this course compehensively provides DBAs with the skills they will need to perform effectively when troubleshooting problem queries and bottlenecks within Sybase ASE.

SAP AG has announced the completion of the cash tender offer for all outstanding shares of common stock of Sybase, Inc., by Sheffield Acquisition Corp., a wholly-owned subsidiary of SAP, which expired at 9:00 p.m., New York City time on Monday, July 26, 2010. American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, the depositary for the tender offer, has indicated that, as of the expiration of the tender offer 80,929,717 shares of common stock of Sybase had been tendered into and not properly withdrawn from the tender offer (including 9,293,901 shares of common stock tendered pursuant to the guaranteed delivery procedures). These shares represent approximately 92.1% of Sybase's outstanding shares of common stock, or 91.8% on a fully diluted basis. All Sybase shares that were validly tendered into the offer and not properly withdrawn have been accepted for payment.

Sybase has reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2010. Total revenue for the second quarter of 2010 grew 9% to $302.0 million, compared to $278.0 million in the second quarter of 2009. License revenue grew 6% to $100.1 million, compared to $94.1 million in the second quarter of 2009, services revenue grew 5% to $147.2 million, and messaging revenue grew 24% to $54.8 million in the second quarter of 2010.

Sybase has announced the availability of its SQL Anywhere 12 database and synchronization solution. A core component of the Sybase Mobility Platform, SQL Anywhere is optimized for mission-critical database applications running outside traditional data center environments requiring little or no onsite IT support. According to Chris Kleisath, senior director of engineering, SQL Anywhere 12 represents a major platform release, providing many key new enhancements for performance and scalability such as support for storage and synchronization of spatial data, support for iPhone devices, and new self-management features.

Confio Software, which offers Ignite 8 performance analysis software, has unveiled IgniteFree, which the company describes as the only free response-time database performance analysis tool. IgniteFree is carved from Ignite 8's primary feature set and gives DBAs a point-in-time view of bottlenecks in their database. IgniteFree for Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and DB2/LUW can be downloaded from Confio at no cost. "We have taken the core feature of Ignite - which is the response time monitoring - and we have packaged it in a free version so that you get all the response time information for real time monitoring for the past hour at no cost," Don Bergal, chief operating officer of Confio, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Quest Software, Inc. has introduced a beta program for Toad for Cloud Databases, a new data access and management tool for non-relational data stored in cloud databases, also known as NoSQL databases. Toad for Cloud Databases is intended to help users unlock data stored in the cloud by using the familiar SQL language or Toad's popular visual query and data access capabilities. Users can query and report on non-relational data, migrate data in both cloud and relational databases from one to the other, and create queries that combine the two.

SunGard, a leading software and technology services companies, has certified the latest version of its Front Arena position control solution with Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15, Sybase's enterprise database management system. Customers using SunGard's newest version of Front Arena to support cross-asset capital markets trading and trading strategies combined with ASE 15 have experienced up to a 400 percent increase in transaction processing of stock exchange data.

Revelation Software has announced the availability of a significant new release of OpenInsight (OI) Development Suite, which continues Revelation's commitment to extend OpenInsight by embracing new technologies as well as providing seamless integration with external databases. OI 9.2, which the company has been working on for more than 2 years, includes the new OpenInsight for Web (O4W) and SQL Connector.

EnterpriseDB has announced the immediate availability of the latest version of its flagship Postgres Plus Advanced Server database. EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.4, which is built on the open source object relational Postgres database, is now fully compatible with all the features and functionality found in the most recent community distribution. In this latest release, EnterpriseDB continues to enrich Postgres Plus by building enterprise-class capabilities on top of the open source relational database management system.

SAP AG announced today the completion of the cash tender offer for all outstanding shares of common stock of Sybase, a partner and a market leader in managing, analyzing, and mobilizing business information. Through this transaction, SAP said it intends to accelerate the reach of SAP solutions across mobile platforms and drive forward the realization of SAP's in-memory computing vision.

The Pythian Group Inc., a remote database infrastructure services company and a Platinum member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork has announced the implementation of the Sun Oracle Database Machine at LinkShare Corporation, a division of Rakuten, Inc., and the launch of Pythian's Oracle Exadata services practice.

Creating standards for cloud computing is key to its future evolution and broader adoption. What is the role of Linux in the cloud? What economic or technological advantages (if any) do open standards-based clouds have? Where else is open source software gaining traction in the cloud, and will customers choose to run a mix of open and 'private-source' software? How does the history of the evolution of Linux relate to the future of the cloud?

SAP AG and CA Technologies announced they are collaborating as part of an effort to meet the latest demands to instill governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market within business and IT processes. Leveraging products from CA Technologies with leading GRC applications from SAP will allow IT executives to gain tighter control over their IT risk and compliance initiatives and focus on long-term value creation for the business.

HiT Software, a provider of data integration products and division of a BackOffice Associates, LLC, says it is shipping a new version of its change data capture and replication product that supports multiple databases as well as support for Netezza data warehouse appliance. The new product, DBMoto 7, also delivers data verification, enhanced administrative security options, and log-based replication for IBM DB2 LUW.

Mid-sized businesses are using and saving more data than ever before. Indeed, the phenomenon that IT engineers have come to refer to as "big data" is being felt in businesses of all sizes. At the same time, however, organizations are facing reduced budgets. Regardless of how much data their likely overburdened IT staff must manage today and tomorrow, mid-sized businesses must find ways to save money by keeping a tight rein on both capital and operational expenditures.

Oracle has introduced Oracle Business Intelligence 11g. "The new release allows customers to integrate relational and OLAP analysis across a multitude of different federated data sources and presents that in a very simple way to end users so that they can do analysis on their own without understanding or needing to know that there might be potentially multiple data sources beneath," Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle Business Intelligence, tells DBTA. Representing the result of a large investment in simplifying the end user experience, adds Rodwick, companies will see "very interactive dashboards that are completely live and completely interconnected and allow business people to do their own analysis without really needing to go into any kind of query tool." The new release also provides new capablities for search and collaboration, and enhanced performance, scalability, and security through deeper integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and other components of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

UniVerse 11.1, scheduled for release in Q3 of this year, will include the External Database Access functionality that already exists in UniData. EDA allows users to map files to the format for another database, and then write directly to it. UniData EDA originally shipped with just a driver for DB2. "We released the API for building additional drivers with UniData 7.2. Once we were acquired by Rocket, we committed to delivering a driver for Microsoft SQL Server. Now we're in the process of building a driver that will work with Oracle," Susie Siegesmund, vice president and general manager, Rocket U2, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Rocket U2 is now looking for people who want to help by testing the driver with their application.

ONware is now offering the ability to use PostgreSQL as a database system for applications developed for U2, D3, MVON and other MultiValue and PICK database environments. The new support for PostgreSQL has been added based on feedback from prospective customers in the MultiValue world, Jack Roth, director of operations, ONgroup, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Roth notes that he has come across a number of companies that have other development in their organizations in Postgres. "They like Postgres and if they can support one database as opposed to two very dissimilar databases, that is an advantage for them," he explains.

Compliance is one of the most interesting elements of any data management plan - it's a microcosm of evolution in action. When many of the laws that impacted data retention were first enacted, business wasn't collecting a lot of information. Now, data collection happens everywhere. And, as citizens have come to realize that more and more of the information about their daily lives is recorded, they demand their governments provide privacy and protection from misuse of that data.

In this issue's column I'll be providing a fundamental introduction to database and database management concepts. Many of you may think that they understand the basic concepts and fundamentals of database technology. But quite a few of you likely do not, so please do not skip over this. First of all, what is a database? DB2 is not a database; neither are Informix, Oracle and SQL Server. Each of these is a DBMS, or Database Management System. You can use DB2 (or Informix or SQL Server) to create a database, but DB2, in and of itself, is not a database.

When integrating data, evaluating objects from multiple sources aids in determining their equivalence. Each source may identify customers, but determining which customer from each system represents the same customer can prove daunting. Sometimes matching things is straight-forward; for example, if all sources should have an accurate social security number or taxpayer ID, success involves simply linking the matching numbers.

Everybody seems to agree with the need for organizations to do a better job of protecting personal information. Every week the media brings us reports of more data breaches, and no organization is immune. Hospitals, universities, insurers, retailers, and state and federal agencies all have been the victims of breach events, often at significant costs. State privacy laws such as the new Massachusetts privacy statutes have placed the burden of protecting sensitive information squarely on the shoulders of the organizations that collect and use it. While some managers might view this as yet one more compliance hurdle to worry about, we feel it presents an excellent opportunity to evaluate existing practices and procedures. The good news is that there are some great solutions available today that can help organizations of all stripes address these requirements while at the same time tightening data security practices, streamlining operations, and improving governance.

NEON Enterprise Software announced that it is offering NEON zPrime for IMS for just one dollar. NEON zPrime for IMS is designed to make costly IMS workloads eligible for processing on IBM specialty processors (SPs) instead of IBM System z central processors. To take advantage of the offer, customers must make a 2-year commitment at a dollar per year, and install a new version of NEON zPrime in production by December 31, 2010.